Book Review: Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America"

There is a principle of physics that states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In his latest book, The Soul of America (2018), historian and biographer Jon Meacham invokes the latter maxim of Newton's Third Law to describe the almost perpetual tug-of-war between progressive and reactive forces in America's 242 years of being a nation. In the latest episode of national turmoil inspired by the rise of right-leaning populist Donald Trump to the American presidency, Meacham entreats readers to remember past moments of discord, and that ultimately, the progressive impulses at the heart of America or the "better angels of our nature," always manage to come through for us (Meacham, 2018, p. 19).

Meacham's historical narrative is divided into seven parts, featuring seven scenarios in which the fate of the Union seemed in doubt: the Civil War, Reconstruction, the backlash to the Progressive Era, the emergence of a Second Ku Klux Klan and the parallel fight for women's suffrage, the New Deal era, the age of McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights movement. Carrying the nation forward were primarily its presidents, who used the muscle of the federal government in repeated attempts to right historical and continuing injustices, as well as ordinary citizens become heroes, from Rosa Parks to Eleanor Roosevelt. (While the former is definitely important, setting the national tone, I believe it's equally, if not more important for a parallel grassroots response to emerge in response to top-down policy proposals and appeals to American values. Otherwise, sustained change is made more difficult by the transitions between each presidential administration.) 

One of the greatest strengths in Meacham's prose is showing that the heroes of each chapter (Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, etc.) were not the perfect, larger-than-life demigods or goddesses that history paints them as, illustrating beautifully Meacham's point that the "American soul" is constantly torn between contradictions of justice, but also prejudice and injustice, progress and regression. While the latter theme is sometimes frustrating in many works of nonfiction today, at times seeming to gloss over or minimize the suffering caused to whole groups of people in favor of amping up a patriotic narrative, in The Soul of America, I think a balance has been more or less achieved. Yes, it's great to be proud of your nation, but you must acknowledge its imperfections, exceptional nation or no. Meacham walks this fine line between acknowledgement of past injustice and optimistic, effluent patriotism very well in his chronicles of how climates of fear and hate are overcome by those who chose to espouse a contrarian politics of progress and optimism.

Whether it is the Emancipation Proclamation, the first in a series of fitful steps to grant equal citizenship rights to African-Americans, or lawyer John Welch's admonition to McCarthy at the height of hysteria over Communism in the '60s, "Have you no decency, sir?," these national corrections of injustice have not come without cost (Meacham, 2018, p. 201). The constant struggle between forces of progress and stagnancy or regression represented starkly in the various fights to expand the promise and protections granted by American citizenship from white, propertied males to African-Americans to women to minorities and to the LGBTQ community shows us all that, despite how free and open our 21st century America may be, that this progress is always vulnerable. That the American promise and the institutions of our democratic republic are still fragile and injustice still exists, with ancient prejudices taking on new disguises. Kinda like America First, the not-so-original 2016 campaign slogan taken from the annals of history in which demagogues the world over incited similar fears of the Other in order to give a toxic buttress to national identity in the face of social, political, economic and cultural change. Sound familiar? History has that ability to eerily rhyme, if one chooses to listen.

Meacham writes that when we, in the present, condemn our forebears for "slavery, or for Native American removal, or for denying women their full role in the life of the nation, we ought to pause and think: What injustices are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those who come after us?" (Meacham, 2018, p. 259). This mindfulness of history is one of several points of advice that Meacham concludes with for American citizens who wish to prove the essential goodness of the American soul rather than exacerbate its darkness. Armed with the knowledge of history and its inevitable cycles of peace and turmoil (or simultaneous periods of both), facts and reason, and a willingness to resist tribalism and engage with all corners of the political world, Meacham is optimistic that this era of Donald Trump can be overcome as well. And it starts with each of us doing our part to help the better angels in their exhausting, Sisyphean fight. 

Works Cited:

Meacham, Jon. (2018). The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels. New York: Random House.